Ever since I watched the footage of President Trump’s inauguration last week, some words have been playing distantly in my mind, like the tune of a half-remembered pop song from several summers ago. They are from a book called Who’s Your City? (2008), which I reviewed on Tychy in 2014, and their author is the urbanist self-help guru Richard Florida. Finally, I would not be satisfied until I had chased up the niggling passage and so here it is:

In today’s spiky world, social cohesion is eroding within countries and across them. Little wonder we find ourselves living in an increasingly fractured global society, in which growing numbers are ready to vote – or tear – down what they perceive to be the economic elite of the world… Managing the disparities between peaks and valleys worldwide – raising the valleys without sacrificing the peaks – is surely the greatest political challenge of our time.

This is now also Donald Trump’s challenge. He may be immediately disqualified from meeting any serious political challenge simply by virtue of being Donald Trump. Yet there is an unlikely bipartisanship, even a frame of mind resembling schizophrenia, to his political makeup which appears to keenly encompass the “greatest political challenge of our time.” Let us firstly look at Florida’s analysis and then consider how aspects of it have been manifested in Trump.

I remember having very positive feelings towards Who’s Your City? When I peruse my review, however, I see that it is freely scattered with moans and quibbles – my enthusiasm is always mislaid somewhere once I robe myself in the sternness of the critic. Perhaps you are required to be patient with Who’s Your City? before you can appreciate its novelty. Florida believes that cities each have their own distinct personalities and that we need his manual because “so few of us have the understanding or mental framework necessary to make informed choices about our location.” Even so, if Who’s Your City? was wholly the self-help book that it aspires to be, then it would be derisory. The mould can be scraped off the bread and there is nutritional value beneath: namely, Florida’s radical overturning of conventional assumptions about the economy and the nation-state.

A considerable share of Florida’s economics is geography. He borrows from Alfred Marshall’s influential model of “agglomeration economies” to assert that:

the real source of economic growth comes from the clustering and concentration of talented and productive people. New ideas are generated and our productivity increases when we locate close to one another in cities and regions.

the huge collections of little firms, the symbiosis, the ease of breakaways, the flexibility, the economies, efficiencies and adaptiveness – are precisely the realities that, among other things, have always made successful and significant import-replacing a process realizable only in cities and their nearby hinterlands.

If I had started out by wondering whether Florida might have predicted Trump’s victory, I later found an article on his own blog for The Atlantic’s CityLab which is entitled “Did Jane Jacobs Predict the Rise of Trump?” Cities and the Wealth of Nations is a big enough book to justify the chutzpah of presenting itself as mixture of heir and usurper to Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. Jacobs argues that the standard nation is “composed of collections or grab bags of very different economies.” The most valuable of these are the cities that alone have the systems to keep producing wealth, but national “grab bags” equally contain industrial or agricultural “supply regions.” These are “inherently over-specialised and wildly unbalanced economies, hence unresiliant and fragile, helpless when they lose their fragments of distant markets.” A nation’s distress at witnessing the inevitable failures of its supply regions will lead it to roll out tariffs and expensive development initiatives, thereby “draining” the “import-replacing” cities which are responsible for the nation’s wealth in the first place. This distress has indeed just elected Donald Trump.

Florida updates Jacobs’ theory by introducing the concept of the “mega-region.” He observes that escalating clustering has produced “a new, natural economic unit that results from city-regions growing upward, becoming denser, and growing outward and into one another.” This new unit combines a productivity which Jacobs had insisted was exceptional to the city, with a scale and power which she had warned was fatal to its success. Today the mega-region can be tentatively identified as a kind of streamlined, junior nation. One of the most striking global examples of this is London, a city which is now practically howling to be liberated from the UK’s one-size-fits-all interest rates and immigration policy (or else, to take them as its alone). The vast urban regions on America’s alternate seaboards are demonstrably different to its inland and more pastoral economies. They too might eventually develop their own political autonomy.

The fact that none of America’s most dynamic economic regions voted for Trump is an ominous, or possibly promising, development. Florida crunches the election data on his blog to find that:

Clinton captured the largest metros [metropolitan areas]. She bested Trump with 55 percent compared to 40 percent of the vote in metros with more than one million people, and won eight of the ten largest metros. These metros accounted for more than half the vote and generate two-thirds of America’s economic output.

Trump took the rest. He won metros with between 500,000 and a million people by 48 percent, compared to 46 percent for Clinton; those with 250,000 to 500,000 people by 52 percent, versus 43 percent for Clinton; and those with under 250,000 people by 57 percent, versus 38 percent for Clinton.

Those who voted for Clinton had “higher income and wages”; they “came from metros with higher shares of college grads… where knowledge, professional and creative class workers make up a larger share of the workforce.” Florida espies a worsening trend:

Clinton support was also much greater in metros with larger concentrations of startups, venture capital investment, and high-tech industry, while Trump votes were negatively correlated with each. These correlations are all stronger for 2016 than they were in 2012.

But, to refer back to the quote at the head of this article, Trump is ostensibly committed to “raising the valleys without sacrificing the peaks.” What is commonly regarded as Trump’s unfitness to represent the Rust Belt – his glitzy extravagance and “germophobic” New York neuroticism – has at least allowed him to strangely span America’s peaks and valleys. As Politicoreported in November, “Trump’s Cabinet and administration could be worth as much as $35 billion, a staggering agglomeration of wealth unprecedented in American history.” And yet many blue-collar workers have still chosen this exotic billionaire to be their class representative.

Trump is certainly inexplicable without the precedent set by Barack Obama. For eight years, there was this aloof, gentle headmaster in the White House. When he was frustrated by Congress, he was oh so disappointed and this absence of urgency must have struck many in the Rust Belt as being bitterly offensive. Workers were then asked to vote for a woman who had been the next-best after Obama in the 2008 primaries. They have instead recruited somebody who, whenever he encounters political opposition, is prone to respond with threats, tantrums, abuse, and three-in-the-morning tweets. Trump surely just looks as crazy as many people feel. He was also the only fiery politician who was remotely available. It would have been wonderful to have a trade unionist stand there at the inauguration and read out the line, “we are transferring power from Washington, D.C. and giving it back to you, the American People.” Wonderful, but entirely fantastical within current American politics.

For Jacobs, national democracy is naturally inimical to guaranteeing undisturbed economic growth. So long as the majority of people, or at least a majority of voters, live outside of the most dynamic regions of the economy, her anti-redistributive solutions are never likely to be election winners. She thought that cities were fatally handicapped without their own currencies. She viewed militarism, social welfare, and international aid as throwing good money after bad. If it is unexpected to find some of these views in a left-wing community activist, how weirder is her assumption that inequality is inalienable because the different regions of a nation are fundamentally unequal in their productive capacities. Sometimes it seems from her analysis that the only answer to the USA’s problems would be for everybody to live and work in a handful of zones on the East and West coast.

Trump’s slogan of “Make America Great Again” has been generally interpreted as a call to make the Rust Belt shine again, by using infrastructure investment, tariffs, and immigration controls to “deliver” or “bring back” jobs. Yet he does not plan to redistribute wealth to the Rust Belt from urban centres of innovation or even from the rich as a targeted social class. Trump has threatened to go after tech firms that move jobs overseas and his hostility to immigration will worry sectors which depend upon skilled migrant labour. Tax on the peaks will nonetheless plummet. The policy analyst Professor Lily Batchelder has calculated of Trump’s tax plans that, “as a share of your income, the tax cut for millionaires is about 18 times larger.” Silicon Valley is said to be rejoicing over Trump’s scheme to allow them to “repatriate” billions of dollars earned abroad tax-free. Instead, taxes have been so far hiked for middle-class homeowners and single-parent families.

So it appears increasingly that the Rust Belt will be paying for its own rejuvenation, both directly through taxation and then later through the price rises which will result from Trump’s protectionism. Jacobs’ position might demand a mass disillusionment, the national acceptance that rust cannot be turned back into iron, along with a political dedication to the difficult, piecemeal growth of genuine import-replacing networks. The precision surrounding this investment is the very opposite of Trump’s blasé plan to slap infrastructure everywhere and hunt migrants to extinction.

Marxists classically anticipate a class crisis and Trump’s presidency could well write it in regions. Wealth-creating urban centres could see themselves as being stunted by Trump’s rambling economics; the intended beneficiaries of his policies will continue to despise metropolitan America if their standards of living do not improve. The self-driving cars and data-sifting algorithms which are at the forefront of urban innovation will leave much more rust across the American landscape. Maybe progress will come only with the realisation that the USA cannot ever be fixed by the federal government. These days, no swanky financier can be a President For All Americans.

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5 thoughts on “A President For All Americans?”

There was this aloof, gentle headmaster in the White House; Obama.
Obama was the first president in US history to keep the US at war for the entirety of his eight-year regime.
During 2016 alone the US dropped 26,171 bombs on wedding parties, funerals, kid’s football games, hospitals, schools, people in their homes and walking their streets, and farmers tilling their fields in seven countries (which he declared no war upon):
Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan.

Worldwide hatred of the United States has risen to a record high during the Obama Regime. The US is now (2016) the most despised country on planet earth.
Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were the founding members of ISIS by bankrolling, arming and supporting jihadists in Syria and Libya to both destabilize the Middle East and expand the domestic police state. Hillary Clinton and Obama also destabilazed Sudan and Ukraine.
The only purposes of these crimes is to enrich the Millitary-industrial Complex and to advance the insane neolib ideology of US world hegemony and Printing Petro-Dollars.

Hillary Clinton even even admitted in 2009 that the U.S. government staffed with many of her closest allies was responsible for al-Qaeda, which morphed into ISIS.

By the end of Obama’s presidency, government debt had nearly doubled (86%) to about $20 trillion. No-one Including George Bush, or FDR (who was in charge during ww2) ever managed to take on nearly as much debt in US history.

Also his birth Certificate was forged, therefore his presidency was illegitimate.

Many (most) blue-collar workers have chosen this exotic billionaire to be their class representative, because unlike Clinton who did not employ or create any real (private sector) jobs, President Trump created many-many thousends.

Tax payers that are single and earn less than $25,000, or married and jointly earn less than $50.000, will not owe any income tax. That removes nearly 75 million households over 50% from the income tax rolls.
They get a new one page form to send the IRS saying, “I win,” those who would otherwise owe income taxes will save an average of nearly $1,000 each.

Unemployed low-skilled people and racial minorities will both benefit hugely from the wall’s construction.It also decreases welfare spendings; and Building the wall itself creates lots of jobs.

The Business Tax Reform will certainly encourage jobs And spur economic growth, as well as cutting and simplifing regulation, President Trump also will be providing the lowest tax rate since before World War II.

Middle Class:

Taxpayers making between $48,652 and $88,148 annually (the middle class) will reap anywhere between $1,174 and $7,052, according to the Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan tax research group.
Just for the record: H.Clinton’s tax plan would have raised massively middle class taxes.

The Rich:

Cutting the taxes of the wealthiest will mean that, the most successful Americans will not be forced to keep their money off-shore, or spend their money abroad.There is no need to explain more on this.

Single Parent households:

Most Single Parent households will not pay income tax for the first time in US history.
Trump will be allowing parents to deduct childcare costs up to the average cost of care in their state from their income taxes. For low-income parents, he offered a $1,200 rebate.

He does not plan to redistribute wealth to the Rust Belt from urban centres of innovation or even from the rich as a targeted social class; because he is NOT a friggin’ Socialist!
Speaking about distribution without mentioning production is simply useless. Thus we must go deeper. Wealth redistribution is a Socialist policy; that steals from the productive members of society (at gunpoint) through taxation in order to feed the ever increasing number of welfare recipients; in order to get their votes..

Sorry, this wasn’t a Freedom of Speech zone. Your comment went into the spam inbox (too many links).

Obama was “was the first president in US history to keep the US at war for the entirety of his eight-year regime.” A statement which is possibly out of context (given that most of the Cold War was fought through proxies) but I agree with you about his warmongering/extrajudicial assassinations. Maybe drones are today’s proxies.

You’ve given me doubts about my line: “So it appears increasingly that the Rust Belt will be paying for its own rejuvenation… directly through taxation.” It was based on this from Professor Lily Batchelder (in the link above from Marketplace): “But there are also millions of individual families who would see their taxes go up under his plan. Single-parent families would face a tax increase if their income’s between $20,000 and $200,000 according to the Tax Policy Center.” Shortfalls will be also likely made up by import taxes, which Wal-Mart etc are worrying will raise the prices of consumer goods.

You are describing Trump’s proposed tax cuts, but this is in a state of anarchy (implementation is already delayed). That infrastructure pays for itself is a brave argument, but one that Trump doesn’t believe in: he’s already downgraded infrastructure spending from $1 trillion to $550 billion. There will be tax cuts and infrastructure spending will rise, but Congress won’t allow the deficit to increase… so there will have to be redistribution if the wheels are going to keep turning.

But I’m interested in your thoughts on what I was really writing about. That wealthy nations are now coming apart – that it is no longer in the interests of urban areas such as London and California to remain part of their “home” nations. That economically and culturally, the disparities are now too great for nations to continue functioning as usual.